After missing their September 20th launch date, we recently discovered that ARCHOS’s 80 and 101 G9 tablets were no longer available with Seagate Momentus Thin HDDs from ARCHOS's online store. However, thanks to the company's helpful representatives, we now have more info about the delay and even a possible ship date.

After reaching out to the company's reps, we received the following response:

“As you know there have been HDD shortages and delays for all manufactures’ [sic] due to the natural disasters in Japan earlier this year. It is the same for ARCHOS and it has delayed our initial launch plans for the 80 and 101 G9s with the HDD.”

The floods that hit Asia earlier this year severely affected HDD production and prices, and apparently ARCHOS was not immune to these issues. Fortunately, the tablets shouldn’t be delayed for much longer, as the representative assured us that the 250GB 80 G9 should be available for sale next week. On the other hand, the rep did not comment on the 250GB 101 G9, but we don’t expect it to take too long.

The 80 and 101 G9 tablets were announced back in June of this year, and feature up to a dual-core Cortex A9 1.5GHz processor, a front-facing camera and Android 3.1. In addition, the tablets were much lauded thanks to the inclusion of Seagate’s 7200RPM Momentus Thin HDD, which adds a whopping 250GB of space and only takes up 7mm. Of course the tablets did run into issues with pricing and delays, but hopefully everything has been taken care of now.